It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks.

Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1].

Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about specifically.

First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan debt (thanks to education costs outpacing inflation by a lot) but suddenly no jobs. It became a bit of a joke to poke fun at such people who had a ton of debt and worked as baristas but this was a shallow "analysis". It was really a systemic collapse. Those entry-level workers are your future senior workers and leaders. Those jobs have never come back.

The rise of DVR/TiVo and ultimately streaming brought on a golden age of TV in the 2000s. It was kind of the last hurrah for network shows that produced 22 episodes a year before streamers instead produced 8 episodes every 4 years.

But what made this system work was an ecosystem. Living in LA, Atlanta and a few other places was relatively cheap so aspiring actors and writers and entertainmnet professionals could get by with secon djobs and relatively low income. These became the future headline actors and senior professionals. Background work and odd jobs were sufficient. Background work also taught people how to be on a set.

Studios still had large writing staffs. Some writers would be on set. Those writers were your future producers and showrunners.

Part of what supported all of this was syndication. That is, networks produced shows and basic cable channels would pay to rerun them. Syndicating some shows was incredibly profitable in some cases (eg Seinfeld).

So the streamers came along and stripped things down. They got rid of junior positions. They adopted so-called "mini writing rooms". Those writers didn't tend to ever be on set. The runs were shorter and an 8 episode series couldn't support a writer in the same way a 22 episode series could. The streamers then were largely showing just their own content so residuals and syndication fees just went away.

All of this is short-term thinking. Hollywood has been both a massive industry and a source of American soft power internationally by spreading culture, basically.

I think the software engineering space is going through a similar transformation to what happened to the entertainment industry. A handful of people will do very well. AIs will destroy entry-level jobs and basically destroy that company and industry's future.

I predict in 10-20 years we'll see China totally dominating this space and a bunch of Linkedin "thought leaders" and politicians will be standing around scratchin their heads asking "what happened?"

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA